Franco ''Bifo'' Berardi - The Soul at Work From Alienation to Autonomy

"globalization" and "virtuality" can be considered thepresent times. Beyond any critical generalization andhumanistic philosophical liquidation of the entire field ofconnected to the word "alienation,)) it is necessary to re(lis(;ov."meaning and the historicity of these concepts in order tostand how they helped interpret that cultural "conjuncture,how they could help us understand the new (is ir really a newhuman condition of connective times.In his 1964 movie Red Desert, Antonioni captured thecoming from figurative art and the nouveau roman to rep'res,elit_rhrough background colors, pop-style Rat interiors andindustrial exteriors-a quality of experience where the warmthimmediacy of human relations were lost. Marriage crises, escap(, anadventure are simply occasions to describe a general cOlndiitie'n tmalaise inhabiting every relationship, and first of all the rel,.tie'n vlitthe self. This was the crisis that the Italian bourgeoisie was ex],eriien>:iniin those years: it prepared the atmosphere leading to the 1968a moment of liberation in which the new warmth of the COllectlvereplaced the coldness of private relations. Antonioni was the dir,ect()rwho best succeeded at representing a passage that is notrelated to culture and politics, but first of all to the sensibilityquality of emotions. Being close to the experience of pop art,nioni could express, in color and form, the Rattening of nuancesthe industrial homologation of different aspects of existence.This happens in a similar way in Persona, a 1966 film by Tn"m.,Bergman whose intentions were, however, completely different. Inthis extremely slow, dazzling black and white movie, the rarefYing ofcommunication becomes the stylistic cipher of the human ambiencethat was brewing in those yeats: later the new winds of warmthand eroticism brought by the students' revolt would finallythat entire emotional landscape. Silence and aphasia incan't be understood as mere signs of individual psyrepresentinginstead a historically and sociallyincommunicability. Bergman's silence and the sunny sitesNorthern seaside resort where the action takes place are thefor an emptiness that becomes loneliness, for thembridgea.ble distance between bodies.The concept of "alienation" waS at the core of the critical disrelatedto these two movies, extremely significant for thescene of that decade. In that context, alienation referred tosubmission of the person to the thing.At the peak of the industrial age the world of things was exploding:serial production generated infinite exemplars of standardized objects,and the assembly line as a productive technique subjugated humangestures to mechanical rhythms. The machine thus became an animatedobject while the body was turned into an inanimate one, separatedfrom any form of consciousness. At the same time mass consumptionserialized behaviors in relation to existing merchandises.Decades of serial reification inRuenced our perception to suchan extent that today we are no longer capable of realizing up towhich point the otherness of the thing transformed the world ofevety day experience, making us estranged from ourselves, if howeverwe admit that "ourselves" means anything at all.The Serpent's EggIn a 1977 movie entitled The Serpent's Egg, Ingmar Bergman tellsthe story of the rise of Nazism in 1920s Germany as if it were a(physical) poisoning of a (psychological) social space, an infiltrationof the milieu of relations and everyday life. Bergman, who oftenTill"! Pnisonfrl Soul I 111